Entertainment

Facebook, Amazon and Kleiner Perkins Start $250 Million Fund for Social Innovation

Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers partner John Doerr just took the stage at Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters to announce sFund, a $250 million fund to back social innovation.

The sFund is a collaboration between Kleiner Perkins, Facebook, Zynga, Amazon, Comcast, Liberty Media and Allen & Company. All are investment partners in the fund.

"If you can't invent the future, the second best thing to do is to fund it," says Doerr.

Together the partners will provide financing, advice and "relationship capital." Amazon will offer up one year of Amazon Web Services to the entrepreneurs, Facebook will provide early access to its platform and APIs, Zynga plans to host sessions for sFund companies for advice on technology and business management, and Comcast will make available its resources and relationships.

Four startups were specifically mentioned during the press conference, one of them being Flipboard, the acclaimed iPad application for social news consumption. The other three startups are Cafebots, Jive Software and Lockerz. Cafebots is in the only sFund project the partners have invested in to date.

Facebook has already shown interest in social innovation. The world's largest social network recently partnered with Y Combinator to inspire the next wave of social innovation around Facebook.

Kleiner Perkins is the same firm that started the $100 million iFund to finance iPhone application development, which was later doubled to $200 million to spur app development and innovation on the iPad.

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